The shout was soon a scream. We ran for the door.
TWO
The sun sat fat and low on the western horizon, at the top of the street, and the last light of the day lent everything vivid faded colors. White lambs, dappled with red and purple wounds, paced a circle around both lanes of the street, not twenty yards from where we stood. Geese dodged in and out between them, and a regal goat oversaw the parade. Each creature had only a gaping wound where its rib cage had been, yet they lived. They opened their mouths to bellow and squawk and bleat, but their organless bodies let out only strange rasps.
Mixed in with the good summer scents—early summer flowers, a neighbor’s barbecue, a campfire farther off still—was the iron of dried blood, the rot of death. The same as the rabbit I’d thought I’d dreamt.
A fluttering, above me, caught my eye. On the power lines, hundreds of birds without rib cages—sparrows and finches, jays and pigeons—cried dry and unholy, an angry jury to the trial below. I was transfixed. I can’t say if it was magic or shock. I can’t say the two are wholly distinct. I stood on the lawn with my jaw hanging low, staring at the undead spectacle before me.
At the center, a man stood, bent over, fighting for breath. He’d been running. He’d been screaming. Hints of white hair peeked out from beneath his sweater’s hood, and he wore patched black jeans and the look of a man condemned. For a moment, I thought he was the master of those animals, some punk rock summoner. But everywhere he tried to walk, a barnyard demon blocked his path. He was trying to reach us.
“Doomsday!” he called out, his voice hoarse from screaming. “Tell Doomsday! Run!”
I started toward him. Vulture put his hand on my arm. He was filming with his phone.
“We’ve got to help,” I said.
“We can’t,” Vulture said. He was near to tears. Brynn, on my other side, was as well. They knew this man, they cared about him.
Thursday and Doomsday stepped out the front door a few moments after the rest of us, each with an identical handgun. She held hers slack at her side, a dead weight. He kept both hands on the grip, his finger near the safety.
Where the hell had I found myself?
Then I saw the deer. The bloodred deer stalked down the hill, the last remnants of the sun at his back, his three antlers in sharp silhouette. The beasts parted for their master, and the old man straightened up, turned to meet his fate.
The creature reared onto his back legs and kicked the man in the chest. His ribs broke loud like gunshot, and my ears rang from the blow. The man collapsed without a sound, and the deer reached his muzzle into his chest and tore out his heart.
If I’d had a car, I could have run. I could have been safe somewhere, anywhere. If I’d had a car. The highway was too far to run, and I had visions of that monstrous deer chasing me over the river, through the forest. Hooves in my back, antlers in my chest, my heart held aloft above my dying eyes. So I didn’t run. I stood, in company with Clay’s friends, near to paralyzed with fear.
“The sun’s almost gone,” Vulture whispered. “It’s powerless, at night.”
The beasts parted once more, and the deer walked off, down the hill, down toward the river and out of sight. The animals plodded slowly after. The birds were still, just then, and the man was still forever.
* * *
“What the ever-loving fuck?” I asked. I was sweating. We were back in the living room, but Doomsday was the only one sitting. I couldn’t figure out if I felt safer near the door and away from these people or far from it and away from the corpse that lay under a sheet on the patio.
Vulture had left with a stranger, shovels over their shoulders, to dig the man’s grave. A small crowd was gathering on the patio. Well-wishers? Investigators? The curious? No one told me, and I couldn’t figure it out.
Brynn put her hand on my shoulder blade. I recoiled from her touch.
“The creature’s name is Uliksi,” Doomsday said.
“What the ever-loving fuck?”
“You knew Clay. You knew his magic?”
“Yeah, I mean, he read tarot and shit. Sometimes he’d wave his hands around, say a couple words about chaos and endless spirits to, like, get our heads straight before we’d do something stupid or dangerous.”
“You’ve never seen one of the endless spirits?”
“No, I hadn’t seen one of the endless spirits because the endless spirits were fucking metaphors, alright?”
“They’re not,” Doomsday said.
“No shit.”
I started tapping the heel of my palm on my outer thigh, obsessively. It wasn’t a nervous habit I’d ever had before. I’d probably never been so nervous.
We’d burned the hell out of dinner, but Thursday came in with teacups on a tarnished silver platter, offered me a cup. I knocked it out of his hand. The porcelain hit the wooden floor and rolled away. If only the floor had been cement, it would have smashed like it should have.
After all these years I’d lived outside of polite society, I’d finally fallen through the looking glass.
“I know you’re freaked out,” Thursday said. “I would be too. But right now? This can’t be about you right now. We’ve got to figure some shit out.”
“No,” Doomsday said to her lover, “it’s alright. The wards will hold. The house is safe. I’m safe.”
The plush couch welcomed me into its embrace. Brynn sat next to me, and I leaned against her. I let my nervous energy flow out of me, into the ground like Clay had taught me. I let a stranger support me. The people in that house, they probably weren’t going to hurt me. That’s about all I could ever be sure of about anyone.
Doomsday met my eyes. She was a severe, powerful woman. Heavyset, commanding, and beautiful. Not without a certain warmth, a certain flicker of something caring at the edge of her eyes.
“The deer’s name is Uliksi,” she told me again. “An endless spirit. A demon. A creature of vengeance that walks these woods, swims in this river, watches this town. He’s been a guardian spirit, until tonight.”
“You worship it,” I said. It wasn’t a question.
“I’d say people revere him. There’s no worship.”
“Why?”
Doomsday sipped her tea. “We summoned him to kill a man, last year on solstice. To kill a man who’d made himself king. We summoned him to keep anyone from following in that man’s footsteps.”
“Desmond,” Brynn said.
“There were about thirty people who moved here at the start,” Doomsday said. “Two years ago, in early spring. Clay was one of them. After a couple of months, when it looked like the place wasn’t about to be cleared out by cops, word went around. More of us showed up, mostly from Chicago. It was hard living, and we were cold and hungry and overworked. For some people, it was a free place to live. Other people, a place where anarchist ideals could be put into practice. Some of us came for our own reasons. It worked alright. Until Desmond.”
“Motherfucker managed to take power,” Thursday said. “No one was supposed to be able to do that. That was the whole point. But I don’t know, he got himself running the security council, then he got himself running just about everything. He did some good, scared some dudes off who were giving us shit, but he just . . . power, man. Power does fucked-up things to people. Attracts fucked-up people in the first place.”
“So you killed him?” I asked.
“No, we didn’t kill him,” Thursday said. Then he looked introspective. “Well, eventually, yeah. But only after it got all Animal Farm up in here and Desmond fucking beat this kid to death. Right there on the bridge. In front of ten people. Caved in his skull, tossed his body into the river.”
“Ben, nicest little crustlord you ever would have met,” Vulture said. He slid the door shut behind himself and started to strip off his grave-soiled clothes. “You have any idea how hard it is to get your friend’s body out of a river?”
“We didn’t know what to do,” Doomsday said. “There weren’t enough of us to ki
ck him out—he had too much sway. We could have killed him, but it would have meant civil war.”
“We were going to leave,” Thursday said. “About half the town was going to leave. Desmond started saying shit about how we couldn’t. Like if we left we couldn’t be trusted, because we knew too much. If we left he ‘couldn’t guarantee our safety.’”
“Clay was the one who talked us out of assassination,” Doomsday said. “Thursday and I were on our way out the door, guns in hand, before the first light of the morning of summer solstice. Almost a year ago now. Clay caught up with us because he was gathering up the only people in town crazy enough to believe in his magic. Rebecca, she was the only other real witch. The man you saw die, his name was Anchor. The three of them came for me. In that early morning fog, we went down to the river, right under the bridge. We each had a role. I was the innocent; they blindfolded me. Clay and Rebecca said their piece; Anchor drew blood up from his palm, let it run into the river and onto the stone. When the solstice sun rose, it drew Uliksi into the world. A spirit that turns the predator into the prey. Uliksi hunts the vengeful, the hateful. As Clay put it, Uliksi hunts those who wield power over others.”
I wouldn’t have believed a word of what she was saying, had I heard it the night before. As she spoke, her voice fell in and out of confidence. Likely, the times she’d told the story before, it had been heroic.
“Desmond and his crew tried to interrupt us. One of his friends ripped my blindfold off just in time for me to watch Uliksi come out of the water. He staggered like a newborn colt, then looked hard at Desmond. Desmond stumbled back, tripped, and Uliksi caught him by the throat. Dragged him over to the river’s edge and held his face beneath the water. Ripped open his rib cage, tore out his heart. Desmond’s crew fucked off. Uliksi stayed.”
“Damn,” I said. Polysyllabic expression was sort of beyond me.
“So yeah, welcome to Freedom, Iowa. For the past year, we’ve had this benevolent, murderous spirit watching over us. Which is weird, but it’s gone fine.”
“Which brings us to tonight,” Thursday said.
“Which brings us to tonight,” Doomsday agreed. “The last thing Clay said to me, when I dropped him off at a truck stop about two months back, was that Uliksi would turn on his summoners. I didn’t really believe him, not until tonight.”
There was a rap on the sliding door, and I jolted. Vulture slid open the door and had a brief conversation with someone.
“They’re ready, I guess,” he reported, then slipped outside.
The Days stood up, straightened each other’s collars and hair, then went out the door.
“Well,” Brynn said, “I suppose we’re going to a funeral.”
THREE
I zipped up my hoodie when I stepped outside. It’s amazing how fast a hot June day gets chilly with the sun gone.
A hundred people or more overflowed the patio and onto the grass, bearing torches or staffs or holding empty hands at their sides. A few faces were bare; others bore ski masks or bandanna masks or homemade bird masks or bank robbing–style bright plastic animal masks. It was so quiet I could hear the toads from the river. It was so quiet I could hear the oil in the torches burning. It was so quiet I couldn’t help but mistake every shuffled foot for the lungless rasp of one of those demon creatures I knew were lurking somewhere.
None of that could shock me. Nothing could shock me.
Six ski-masked figures hoisted a pine coffin to their shoulders, because apparently I was in the kind of squatted town where people have pine coffins lying around in case someone gets murdered by the local pet demon. I recognized Doomsday by her tattooed hands—she was a pallbearer.
A hand touched the center of my back and, startled, I jumped. For a moment, all those strange, hidden faces turned to look at me, and some gazes lingered for far too long.
“Sorry,” Vulture whispered in my ear.
He was unmasked, as was Brynn. When the pallbearers left for the street and the crowd followed, those two walked with me, alongside me. Flanking me, like guards escorting a prisoner. Or, you know, like friends trying to comfort someone.
In that strange procession, I got a chance to see more of both the town and its denizens, though the landscape was masked by darkness and the people were just masked. Torchlight—and the realization that magic exists in the world—lent a beauty even to those mass-manufactured Midwest houses. Every single one might hold mysteries beyond imagining.
Most, presumably, just housed the punks and hippies and weirdos who surrounded me.
A handsome, small man in overalls and a ball cap joined us at the back of the march, and Vulture whispered an introduction. “Danielle, meet Kestrel, my partner.”
But Kestrel, after shaking my hand and holding Vulture for a moment, ducked back into the crowd. I didn’t have a chance to really get a first impression of him.
We wound our way up the hillside, past a half-collapsed school and its attendant sports field and a rusted hulk of a yellow school bus, past a burned-out post office, past a fire station that was clearly lived in. The only electric light I saw shone inside a small grocery, which was lit up by its bank of fluorescents. The place was filled with furniture, tools, and food. Well-lettered in red and yellow along the facade were the words: EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE. A folding sidewalk sign out front read: A FREE MARKET SHOULD MEAN EVERYTHING IS FREE.
We continued past, the coffin leading the way, a few of us straggling behind the crowd. Just after the market, a few abandoned lots were filled with spires and mounds and bare saplings. When the procession turned off the main road and we wound our way along plywood paths, I recognized a permaculture garden. The spires were stacked tires, presumably packed with dirt and growing potatoes. The mounds were like long barrow graves, but they were likely hugelmounds—each built around dead logs, designed to break down into raised beds for gardens. Several vegetable beds were marked off and showed a wide variety to harvest in the coming months: spinach and beans, cauliflower and spring onion, fennel and peas. The spindly young trees were newly transplanted, and likely had yet to bear fruit.
We kept walking, and as the path turned back over on itself and spiraled through the field, it left me dizzy with the fire in the air and the magic I’d seen and the strangeness of the place. The garden went on forever, I was walking forever, trying as hard as I could to keep myself grounded. Keep myself focused. The ground beneath my feet.
At last we reached the tree line. The trees were my age or younger, still threatened by their undergrowth. Between us and the forest, in the liminal space at the edge of the garden, four wooden posts marked four graves. A fifth grave sat empty.
Whispers began to break the ceremonial silence. I made my way to the grave posts, ornately carved and oiled stakes about as high as my waist with lettering running down their length. Daniel Rojas. Benjamin “Filth” Simmons. Danielle Keeler. Desmond Smith. Daniel’s name was followed by what I presumed was his name in Mayan pictographic script, Benjamin’s by Norse runes, Danielle’s by Irish ogham.
Daniel and Danielle. Half the graves in Freedom bore a version of my name. What a fun coincidence. What a great evening I was having.
A hush went over the crowd once more, and the pallbearers set the coffin upright in front of the empty grave. There was no lid, and Anchor’s naked corpse faced the crowd. Loving hands had cleaned and stitched his wounds, and while his chest was mangled and his ribs were broken, he was not so horrific to look at as I would have expected.
Four pallbearers climbed down into the grave. One masked man was tall enough that his head was still visible, but Doomsday and the others were lost to sight. The remaining pallbearers eased Anchor from the coffin and into the waiting hands of those below, and he was set gingerly into the grave. He was to be buried, naked, without chemicals or fiberglass or steel or even the pine box. But not without ceremony, not without love.
The crowd helped the four grave attendants climb out, and townspeople lined up to put handfuls of s
oil into the grave. Still, no word had been spoken.
Wildflowers had taken over the oldest grave, nearby.
Clay was buried somewhere outside Denver in a manicured field, adorned only with cut flowers, slowly rotting in a fiberglass box. Maybe he belonged here, where the weeds and the wild could grow over his body, where he would feed the soil that fed the people who’d known him.
Or, maybe he was better off where his mother could visit.
* * *
“Anchor named himself better than anyone I’ve ever met,” Thursday said, standing at the foot of the grave, alongside the now-empty coffin. “I know he picked the name because he’d spent so long as a sailor, but he kept us grounded into the bedrock, of both the land and our collectivist ideals. I don’t know that there’s one person here who would live in Freedom right now if it weren’t for Anchor’s work. As a mediator, a facilitator, sure. More than that, his work as a friend. No one is perfect, but as far as I can tell, Anchor got all that being imperfect out of his system when he was younger, before half of us were born. The world is darker for me, now, and it will be from now until someday when I join him buried here in black earth of Freedom.”
The masks were off, and I saw faces hung down in silent prayer.
“Anchor’s death was needless, and there’s no ignoring that. What he made, we should unmake. What he summoned, we should unsummon. We’ll get by on our own.”
Thursday shuffled back into the crowd and into Doomsday’s embrace, and he started sobbing.
A stranger went up, one of the tallest men I’d ever seen—the pallbearer who had stood head and shoulders above the edge of the grave. His arms were freckled from the sun, and torchlight glittered on the studs on his punk vest. He had an easy charm to him, the kind of easy charm that raises red flags in anyone who’s known a lot of handsome, entitled men.
“Anchor was more a father to me than my pops was,” he said, “though I guess that’s not saying too much, is it?”
A few people chuckled at that.
The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion Page 2